Chapter 20
There are no homes left here for a funeral.
Everything has been burned, and what hasn’t is torn to the ground out of love.
All who are left strip Gyeosi of everything it was as if they can cleanse it.
But there is too much blood and too much ash.
Still, the living take their loved ones down to the creek to wash their bodies.
There is no rice to give them before they are buried, so they are buried with orchids and lilies and yarrow growing from their mouths.
There are still villagers out there now, crying. An older sister lying atop her younger sister’s grave, clutching her chest, screaming. “Ya!” she sobs, clawing at the fresh dirt. “Answer me! Where are you going? Not without me—not without me, please,” she begs.
Basuin never cried, but when he brought Isaniel back with him in pieces to bury, Kensy gripped his shoulder so hard it smarted and bruised. Soldiers don’t cry. Soldiers move on, or they die in Valkesta, or they are sent across the sea to a new continent as punishment.
It wasn’t just punishment. Kensy meant to use him—to manipulate the only man he knew to still worship the gods. Kensy’s always used Basuin because Basuin’s always let him. And now, he fears what Kensy looks for in this forest. He fears what Kensy will do if he finds any gods left here.
He fears for Ren. Because if she knows where that godly artifact hides, then Kensy won’t hesitate to kill her, too. Kensy warned him the first time and Basuin didn’t listen.
Ren is weak. Her clothes are stained red and her magic wanes—he can feel the loss of it. He’s the one that took it, again. And again. And now—and again.
Among the remains of her village, Ren sits in the charred hollow of a tree that once held the homes of spirits, legs folded beneath her.
Even when she couldn’t find the strength to walk the lingering spirits of the dead to the Winter River, Ren didn’t cry.
She sits in her calm demeanor before those who are left, red mottled skin peppered with blisters and burns.
“You will leave,” she tells them, “and you will never come back here.”
There are gasps and tears among the villagers and Basuin swallows back bile.
“There is nothing left here for you,” she continues.
“The army has come, and they will come again. They will destroy this forest if they aren’t stopped, so you must leave.
” For a moment, Ren’s eyes drop, only to find the crowd once again.
“There is still time. Go to the north—there are villages there where you will be safe. We will slow them down, push them back.”
“But will you stop them?” a woman shouts from the crowd, her face screwed up and stricken. “Must we die for this?”
Someone yanks on the woman’s arm, shaking her to stop. Bass feels his legs start to move, to shield Ren and to speak in her stead. It’s automatic; he won’t let another spirit hurt her for his crimes. But as if Ren senses it, her hand halts him.
“How are we supposed to believe going north will save us?” someone else, someone younger, yells. “You don’t even know how to stop them!”
“I’ve not led you astray before. But I can’t promise you anything, either,” she says truthfully. “All we can do is try.”
Behind the crowd, in the trees, Ko pulls Haaman into his embrace, folding them into his long swathes of sleeves. Bass should look away, but his eyes linger. From this distance, the image of them together is blurry. It makes something deep in his stomach ache.
There is silence, and no one moves until Ren speaks again.
“I am sorry,” she says, though it’s quieter than the rest of her words have been. A wave of crying ripples through the spirits, some bowing their heads and some hanging their heads and some leaned back and wailing for their dead.
One man stands, and he bows with his whole body to Ren. “Thank you, Am-sa.”
Ren closes her eyes and bows her head back to him. She doesn’t speak, but Bass reads her lips. The magic thread between them, linking their fingers from afar, pulses.
“Do not thank me.”
She sits there, even as people begin to leave.
Even as the dead are brought from the creek and buried in the shallow graves that have been cut to size.
Even when Ko and Haaman disappear into the forest, saying they’ll be back at dawn.
Even when Yaelic stops crying after Hami’s grave is covered, Qia hugging him and helping him back to the hut.
She sits there, and Basuin stands beside her, a stone guardian at her side. He’ll be the last.
It’s only once the moon has risen to the center of the sky, a sliver of it left, to signal that the darkest night is on its way, that Ren unfurls her limbs from the hollow of the tree.
Bass reaches for her hands and catches her as she stumbles on weak knees.
Her fingers dig into his arms and her weary body trembles in his grasp.
“I don’t know what to do anymore,” Ren whispers to him. It makes her seem so small, so vulnerable. Bass thought she would die at the Crying Trees when he left her. Even now, she’s pained, skin fragile and chilled to the touch. Only the places where she’s burned still hold a heat unlike any other.
“We’ll figure it out,” he says. “I told you that. We’ll figure it out, once you’ve healed.”
Ren laughs, cut and dry and sour and not at all sweet and church bells and starlight like he once heard before. “I may not heal this time,” she says. “I may never heal from this.” Her words are biting, coated in poison he could lick from her teeth.
“How were you hurt?” he asks, eyes drawn over the marks littering her body. He saw it before—the way she bled from her arm, the way blisters crawled across her skin.
“Gyeosi burned,” she says, as if it makes sense. As if all the times he’s seen her—cut and burned and bruised and hurt—should make sense. Wounds he could not place. Things she refused to say.
Gyeosi burned and Ren hurt for it.
The wolf-man snaps its teeth around his rib and Basuin feels all the force of it.
The sharp pain throws him and he almost falters as he guides Ren toward the creek.
He’s stupid. He’s so stupid—all fight and no strategy, Kensy said.
But my hand will guide you steady into the battle, and we will find victory together, Basuin.
“The forest,” he says, looking at her. “It hurts you.”
Ren doesn’t look back at him. “The forest and I are one.”
It makes him ache. He’s frozen, and Ren takes it upon herself to take a step forward without him.
But she falls, catching herself on a tree before he can sweep her back under the stability of his arm.
Now, she looks at him, and her eyes are silver in the light of the moon above them, something precious.
Ren holds out her hand, and he takes it, and then she presses her right palm against the bark of a tree and a burst of blue magic fills the night.
Ren burns a hole through the tree, sap dripping like lava from its orifices. A burn, red and angry, crawls over the skin of Ren’s forearm.
“I told you.” Her face is grim. “When the forest dies, so will I.”
Kneeling at the bank of the creek, Basuin washes Ren’s burns with a fraying rag. He tries to be gentle—as gentle as his big, clumsy fingers can be—but anger simmers in his blood. Ren is quiet and still, watching as he cares for her wounds.
“Don’t do that again,” he scolds.
As he turns to dip the rag into the clean water again, Ren says, “I won’t.”
The wolf-man is restless inside him and Bass feels it. His fingers twitch under the pressure to be soft and caring, which he hasn’t practiced for a very long time. Bass isn’t soft, he isn’t sweet. He is strong, and he is a soldier. But right now, he would rather be nothing at all.
When he fishes out a roll of bandages from his pack, fumbling with it as he unrolls it, he tries to remember who always wrapped his wounds. Sometimes, he ripped the gauze with his own teeth. Other times, it was the nurses in the healing huts.
But when Isaniel shared his tent, slept in the same cot, he always turned his back to Bass. He never watched when Bass rinsed blood from his hands in the water basin and wrapped his sprains out in the field. No matter what it was, Isaniel did not look at him.
His fingers shake from the work of being gentle as he wraps white bandages around the burn Ren suffered from her own hand.
“It doesn’t hurt,” she says.
“Liar,” he says, jaw tight and aching. How stupid he was, stubborn. It’s what burned Gyeosi down. It’s what killed his squad, in Valkesta. His own boar-headedness. Regret tastes like whiskey and smoke and blood, and it makes his head swim.
Bass runs his thumb over the gauze, over the burn he hopes won’t scar. Her body doesn’t carry the white lines marking his bronze skin, the remains of war. She’s fragile, but smooth like silk. Tough, then. Delicate but strong. He feels it in the muscle running under her skin, sinew and bone.
“We have to stop him,” Bass says, turning to wash his hands in the creek. It’s cold against his hot palms, against his burning god mark.
“Him?” Ren asks, falling back to sit on the rocky shore.
Bass curses at his thoughtless wording. He should’ve said the legion. “My commander.” He does the same, sitting on the bank with a grunt. “The legion’s. Commander Kensy.” Bass can’t help but say his name with something violent in his voice.
Ren draws her knees to her chest. “He brought the army here?”
“Yes.”
“He brought you here, too.”
Bass picks up a rock and skips it over the surface of the water.
“Yes.” But it’d be so much easier if he could say it was the ocean.
That Ithika carried him here. It would feel better than to say that a godless man dragged him onto a godless boat which sailed to a god-full island in search of quest and conquest.